Nobel Prize Winners

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to
tell it. And may they please forgive me for not
having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not
having divined it all.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Author's epigraph to The Gulag Archipelago

It seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing;
rather, I was swept along, my hand was being
moved by an outside force, and I was only the firing
pin attached to a spring.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Invisible
Allies

It certainly helps that he looks like a figure out of the Old Testament,
but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring image is likely to be that of the
prophet of the Soviet Union's doom. No one, including Ronald
Reagan, deserves more credit for making the West, and Russia itself,
face the fact that Communism was evil, that it had to be defeated, and
that it was entirely possible to defeat it. Where One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his most widely read work, is a
devastating portrait in miniature of the effects of Soviet oppression on
one man, the multi-volume
Gulag Archipelago is the sprawling canvas
upon which he depicts the entire vile system, sweeping across the decades
since 1917 and touching upon every facet of society. It is, in essence,
the Prosecutor's indictment, stating the case against the enormous criminal
enterprise that was the U. S. S. R. It's always seemed to me that
the only document you can really compare it to is Martin
Luther's 95 Theses. It too represented a righteous and unanswerable
rebuke to a seemingly invincible institution, served as a rallying point
for reformers and outright opponents, and ultimately contributed to wholesale
changes in that institution (Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the
Catholic Church in one case, eventual demise in the case of the Soviet
Union) which would have been nearly inconceivable in its absence.

The Gulag represents Solzhenitsyn's attempt to document nearly
every phase of the Bolshevik's use of the police apparatus and prison camps
for the suppression of dissent, or suspected dissent. Using a wide
range of actual examples--many of them personal, others taken from fellow
prisoners he might while he was detained--he takes the reader step-by-step
through the process of arrest, interrogation, conviction (always conviction),
transportation, and imprisonment. One is prepared for a tone of righteous
indignation and bitter irony, but I was surprised to find here a kind of
dark good humor. Perhaps this is done for effect, Mr. Solzhenitsyn
suggesting that the claims of criminality upon which the authorities persecuted,
and murdered, so many are worthy of only bemusement. After all, what
can be more dangerous to absolute power than for people to greet it with
contemptuous laughter? Obviously nothing, since Mr. Solzhenitsyn
was banished from the Soviet Union on February 13, 1974, just two months
after portions of this work began appearing in print in the West, after
the KGB had obtained a draft copy. In all likelihood, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's
life was only spared because he was already a Nobel
Laureate by then, having won
the prize in 1970, though he was forbidden to travel outside the country
at that time to accept it.

Besides offering a comprehensive Russian account of Soviet terror, Mr.
Solzhenitsyn does something of extraordinary importance here, the importance
of which most in the West did not fully comprehend until after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, if then : he drapes the crimes of Communism around
the neck of not just Stalin but of Lenin too, and traces the roots of the
terror to the very philosophy of Communism itself. It had been a
convenient myth for party members in the Soviet Union and fellow travelers
here in that the Russian Revolution had been a noble cause and an initial
success that was gradually corrupted by the personal evil of just one man,
Stalin. True believers clung to this idea both to justify their collaboration
with the regime and to give themselves hope that the system could be reformed,
to get it back on its original track. Mr. Solzhenitsyn began the
process of yanking this prop out from under them, of demonstrating that
the system was rotten to its evil core, that no past actions were justified
and no just future was possible. In his excellent book, Lenin's
Tomb, David Remnick makes a convincing case that Gorbachev failed
to understand this critique and its power, and failed to anticipate that
it would be the central feature of Glasnost, delegitimizing and destabilizing
communism entire, whereas he expected only criticism of certain past leaders
and practices, which he could use to his own advantage.

Born into a family of Cossack intellectuals, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated in mathematics and physics, but within weeks the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler for its survival.
Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.
He spent the next eight years as one of the countless men enduring the gulags. He was one of the lucky ones to survive.

Of particular merit is Mahoney's chapter on Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister of Russia from 1906 until 1911, who might be called the "hero" of Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel. Stolypin, a liberal who nevertheless admired Russia's ancient culture, attempted to reform his nation's semi-feudal political and economic practices while at the same time preserving the old customs and habits that were the bonds tying Russian society together. Stolypin was the only Russian statesman who understood the delicate balance between the old and the new — between conservation and change. His assassination led to the fall of the Tsar, the victory of Bolshevism, and the murder of millions of innocent people crushed under the relentless and inhuman Red Wheel.